Projecting Personhood in Melanesia: The Dialectics of Artefact Symbolism on Sabarl Island

Dialogics of material culture: male and female in Murik outrigger canoes

“…Taken together, the findings and approaches espoused by Forge, Munn, Weiner, Wagner, Strathern, and others (e.g., Battaglia 1983) have emphasized the agency that Melanesians bring to the construction of plural, potentially contradictory metaphors of social reproduction through material objects. We have not found among these analyses, however, an apt conceptualization dialogics of material culture of those gendered voices that musr accompany these processes in relationship to each other.…”

Life among the tides : recent archaeology on the Georgia Bight : proceedings of the Sixth Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, May 20-22, 2011.

“…Artifacts that are mobilized in the context of death are quite often concerned with the (re)constitution of social relationships. Indeed, death often triggers remittances, in the form of exchange, for debts and obligations accrued between allied or competing descent groups (e.g., Battaglia, 1983Battaglia, , 1990Kan, 1989;Munn, 1990;Weiner, 1992). In this context, nonlocal vessels and paddle matches are likely to have been the result of marriage alliances (e.g., Stoltman and Snow, 1998;Stephenson et al, 2002), but not because women carried their possessions during changes in residence.…”

Discussions Around a Sand‐drawing: Creations of Agency and Society in Melanesia

“…To make her point she turns to Sabarl Island, where the self is not missing but implicated in a specific theory of agency that takes a triangular shape analogous to the elbow or the ceremonial axe used in mortuary ceremonies. In this imagery the self is built up from the two sides of the triangle, but depends on a third party to bring these sides together at the ‘joint’ (Strathern 1988: 270; see also Battaglia 1983: 296). Strathern sees this triangular shape of agency as a specifically Melanesian model of relationships, and I wish to follow this up with regard to North Ambrym sociality.…”

“…This article has grown out of my work with my doctoral dissertation, which was based on fieldwork on Ambrym Island during the years 1995-6 and 1999-2000(see Rio 2002a. I want to thank Bruce Kapferer, Olaf Smedal, and Edvard Hviding in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen for comments during the earlier stages of this work.…”